Love in a Warm Climate

“Life gets exaggerated the closer one gets to the equator.” So said one South Carolinian. Personally, I’m not sure what hope there is for me, being of a capricious mix of Virginian, North Carolinian and Ecuadorian. But, if anyone understands the complexity of the southern personality, it’s the documentarian Ross McElwee. I first encountered his film Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation in 1997 during my junior year of high school. Home sick on the sofa, I settled in to watch what I thought, in the manner of Ken Burns, would be a little review on 19th-Century military tactics. While there are reverberations of southern history and culture throughout the film, there is more Woody Allen than War Between the States in this piece of cinéma vérité. The North Carolina raised, Brown educated McElwee presented what was then, in 1986, a freshness and almost voyeuristic account of his infatuations and failed attempts at love. McElwee closely examines “southerness” in a modern context, without the sacchrine sentimentality and faux historicism of a Gone with the Wind Convention. The film covers, what is for me, personally familiar geography—North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina and nearby Sullivans Island to name a few locations (I had no idea at the time I would end up at the College of Charleston). Like a good piece of Southern Gothicism, it’s replete with characters. There is the first object of McElwee’s fascination—the aspiring actress Pat, with her unique (uhhumm) exercise regimen and her cinematic visions of space aliens and Burt Reynolds; the magnified personality of Charlene Swansea—you are immediately struck by the feeling “This woman must come for cocktails”--a reformed Southern Baptist who once exchanged letters with the imprisoned poet Ezra Pound.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a few of McElwee’s other documentaries--Time Indefinite and Backyard. None should be approached without seeing Sherman’s March first. So net-flix it. It even comes approved by the folks down the street at the Library of Congress—deemed culturally significant and worthy for preservation in the National Film Registry.